Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

June in Review

I passed the 2,000 post mark earlier this month. That is more than one post a day since I started, though size and quality vary greatly among posts. I will have to find some way to see how many total words I’ve written.

This month also saw the breaking of the daily page view record for the site yet again. This time around somebody linked a rather old post on Reddit. Reddit is a new experience for me, I’ve never used it and have never before been linked there. The traffic from the link broke the old record by about 10%. The link also made Reddit the #1 referral source, doubling a month of VirginWorlds traffic in a single day.

The post in question is at the top of the list of most viewed posts for the month. Yeah, that one. A prognosticating octopus, cats playing patty cake, and now that.

FrontierVille came along, evoking the whole Oregon Trail thing… for which they recently were sued. And a good thing to, as they are a bunch of lying bastards there at Zynga. They never sent me my FarmVille magnet.

10 most pressing world issues 2011
[This post is the first item returned for that search]

castle dollhouse plan
[Are they building something, or trying to produce a new TV series?]

eve online getting your bearings
[You can see exactly where you are if you jump off that cliff labelled “learning curve”]

what is the wilheim experience
[Sorry, this is the Wilhelm Arcturus Experience]

Spam Comments of the Month

You cannot post new topics in this forum…..You cannot reply to topics in this forum…..You cannot delete your posts in this forum…..You cannot edit your posts in this forum…..You cannot create polls in this forum…..You cannot vote in polls in this forum…

[And you cannot comment on this blog post.]

Most characters give little thought to their The guild names that make news such as Thott’s Everquest guild Afterlife Thott now runs the popular World of Warcraft site that bears his name are not the ones we remember for their names. Some guild names will make you smiles and other ones are just so cool that they deserve special recognition. Perhaps the ones that are most memorable are those that make a play on a band name.

[I think they were trying to make this look like a ping-back. Linked to somebody’s Business Review site. And they obviously have no idea how long Potshot and I spend thinking up guild names.]

wher exactly can I download pokemon black without paying?

[No idea wher, bro.]

EverQuest

Fippy Darkpaw is headed towards the next expansion, Scars of Velious. Haven’t been back all month, but I keep meaning to visit.

EverQuest II Extended

This remains my main game for the time being. Gaff and I have been on a lot and our guild is moving slowly towards level 40. Getting the whole instance group to show up though… well… as I have said, there might be a reason we seem to have a hiatus every summer.

EVE Online

How to even summarize the last month of EVE? My own experiences are so tiny in the backdrop of total forum war.

EVE is being hammered over a combo of bad turns. There was the licensing fee for monetizing 3rd party apps which wasn’t really a bad thing, but was communicated so poorly… it was so vague that every negative “what if..” you could think of couldn’t be discounted… that it put the community in a bad mood.

Then came Incarna and the Noble Store and the new currency, which pissed some people off. Then there was the pricing, which pissed off another segment. Then there was the internal newsletter that talked about the possibility of selling things like special ammo and faction status, which really set a lot of people’s hair on fire.

And if that wasn’t enough to stir the pot, the rest of Incarna failed to impress a lot of people, me included. Sure, the agent finder is good (though years late) and I want to try out the revised-yet-again new player experience. But the Captain’s Quarters turned out to be amusing for a very short duration and turning it off to claim back the system resources it needed (or to make you system usable it you had an ATi video card) left you with the dreaded static station door picture.

I cancelled my account 4 days into Incarna. Not in rage over anything in particular, but because it brought nothing new to the table for me and actually made a few things worse. I was not inspired to find something new to do in the game.

This who Incarna blow-up should make for an interesting “One Year Ago” post next June. Now to see if CCP can fix it. The CSM Incarna summit is even now going on.

Facebook

I started playing the new Zynga game Farms & Allies or whatever it is called. It is clearly another step in the evolution of games that Zynga has stolen created, building on FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille, and the work of Charles Ponzi.

You still do not actually interact with anybody else in real time, but you can attack other players and NPCs while you build your empire. In a few more generations Zynga might actually be making “real” games, whatever that means.

If you’re playing, send me an neighbor invite soon, since my track record with Zynga is to get fed up with repetitive nature of their games in a few weeks time and leave, turning off all possible access I can with Facebook. (Because otherwise Zynga will flood you with messages.)

On the flip side, I stopped playing SOE’s Dungeon Overlord because I hit a point, not very far into things, where the only way I could figure out to continue the game was to spend money, and I frankly didn’t like it enough to do that.

I might have spent some money if I could have used Station Cash from my main SOE account, but Dungeon Overlord only accepts Facebook credits, which I am told are the Deutsche Mark of the Beast.

Other PC Games

I bought Gratuitous Space Battles on a whim. I had a discount code and it looked interesting. I may not have given it enough of a chance, but the space battles seem to be more tedious than gratuitous. You set up the battle, then you watch the battle. But I found watching the battle to be a chore… and I’m not all that sold on the fun of setting up the battle. And yet I find practically the same mechanism in a game like Combat Mission to be quite engrossing.

PlayStation 3

The PlayStation Store came back online at last and I was finally able to download my free games as part of the Sony “make good” program. I guess I should consider myself lucky, as I understand the PlayStation Network still isn’t fully operational in Japan. After consulting with my daughter, we went with:

Super Stardust HD – An update to the game Asteroids. Bright, shiny, loud, but not especially deep or engaging.

Wipeout HD + Fury – Mario Kart in futuristic hovercraft racers. Bright, shiny, loud, and with a techno beat sound track, but Mario Kart. Okay, there are a few race modes that Mario does not have, but we’re talking evolution, not revolution.

I wouldn’t have paid money for either game. My daughter and I have played a bit of both, favoring Wipeout for the most part. She likes the music. In the end though, she downloaded the demo for Fancy Pants Adventures and probably spent more time with that than we did with the two free titles.

But the PS3 still makes a fine machine for watching movies in Blu-Ray or streaming Netflix in HD. I think we stream more Netflix with it than all other uses combined.

Coming Up

We will see how the summer hiatus season affects the instance group and whether we will stick with EQ2.

I still have time on my EVE account, so I would like to spend an evening going through the updated Incarna new player experience. Maybe that plus the new agent finder will make the expansion worthwhile to new players… and CCP might need some new players if they don’t get things settled down.

Then there is Star Wars Galaxies. I grabbed the client. I have All Station Pacsess or whatever it is called this week, so I am already subscribed. I told myself I am going to take some time to visit the game one last time. But honestly, I only played post-NGE and only for a short time, so I’m not actually all that invested and don’t really have any places I feel I need to visit “one more time.”

I’ll probably end up just running the tutorial and taking some screen shots of C3P-0 and Han Solo.